Founder Fit

I was a dumpling mogul. Some called me the Dumpling Kingpin of NYC, but others only referred to me in whispers as Machine Gun Xiao Long Bao.

OK, maybe in a fever dream I had visions of being the Boss Bao, but I did host food tours over a decade ago. It was a hobby, started as a bet with a friend and his atrocious opinions about the best NYC Chinatown dumplings on his food blog.

I have some experience here. I had lived in Beijing for a year, and I traveled across China eating everything I could. This was when I fell in love with dumplings of all kinds and returned to NYC craving real dumplings, not the gummy lumps served in the Chinese American takeout joints.

So I challenged my friend to a dumpling throwdown. The plan was to visit ten dumpling places, rate each place, and declare a winner. We invited some friends to come join. On the day of our dumpling challenge, instead of a few people joining us, we had forty hungry people ready to chow down on dumplings.

We never did get to ten spots with our motley crowd. It was so much fun though I did a follow up with soup dumplings. Then I followed up with a few more tours for friends missed the prior tours. That was when a friend connected me with a Berlin startup that built an app for people to book tours and for tour guides to operate their business.

As a tech guy, I appreciated a better way of automating the manual stuff I was doing to arrange tours using email and spreadsheets. I posted a few dates to try out the system, and soon people started booking tours from all over the world, hungry for dumplings and a bit of NYC history. I went from one tour a month to multiple tours per week.

Then one December, I keep getting a constant stream of pings from my phone.  As I scrolled my messages, it was requests for tour bookings. I asked one of people that had sent a request how they found out about the tour, and they mentioned an article in The New Yorker included my tours as one of the “perfect holiday gifts” of the year.

You cannot buy this type of promotion. Most people would be ecstatic at the news. Except I was terrified, staring at a waiting list of over 300 people wanting to book dumpling tours in the dead of NYC winter. I immediately deactivated my tour listings, disabled my website, and ignored all requests, including those from people that hunted me down on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In startup speak, I had product market fit. When I say product market fit, I refer to the definition that Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz uses:

Marc based his views on that of Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital. Andy called his idea “value hypothesis”, where a startup has product market fit when it can definitively answer the “what, who, and how” of the business.

Founder market fit is a newer concept. In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was assumed that the entrepreneurs launching startup were domain experts. The complexity, accessibility, and cost of the technology was a huge barrier for someone not already deeply familiar with the industry. The average person did not have mainframes to play with.

The Internet and cloud computing fundamentally changed that model in a few ways. First, the technology became much easier to learn through free resources. Second, anyone could access the technology with just a browser and a decent connection. Third, the cost of building tech products went from millions of dollars to almost free. Silicon Valley was no longer the walled garden only available to the insiders.

This has opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs globally to build a tech startup. Whether someone is a seasoned software engineer or completely new to the world of tech, they can and are launching new tech enabled businesses. Many of these startups however will fail not because of money or product or team, but because the startup they wanted to build was never a good fit to begin with.

This is why I mention my dumpling tour story. Even though I had a potentially great product that I liked doing, it was not something I envisioned doing for the next ten years and beyond. Despite gaining the experience and streamlining the operations, I had no passion for the business. What was missing was Founder Market Fit.

Many investors and successful entrepreneurs will tell you that Founder Market Fit is important. Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz shared this definition:

Too many investors get caught up in the “deep understanding of the market”. They hinge their views of a founder by pedigree such as years of experience in the domain, advanced degrees, and depth of industry network and credibility. For deep tech and bio tech startups, this would generally be a valid expectation. However, for nearly any other area of technology, this is no longer a useful heuristic for evaluating the potential success of a startup.

Being an outsider can be an advantage. When you have not been indoctrinated by years of established ideas and methodologies, having a fresh perspective can lead to breakthroughs. We can see this in founders from Airbnb to SpaceX to Uber. None of the founders had deep domain knowledge in their respective industries, yet they disrupted massively entrenched markets. As the author of the book Range states:

What is missing from these explanations is the need for passion. Founders have to truly love the problem and love it enough to want to go all-in to build a business around it for the next several years without losing enthusiasm. When I looked at my future as a dumpling tour mogul, I didn’t see that vision. Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge had this to say:

Building a startup from zero to something is like a rocket launch. It takes an insane amount of thrust to get an object into orbit. The Earth’s gravity will pull anything back to the surface that does not reach 11.2 kilometers per second escape velocity. For a founder, that “gravity” can be anything that slows you down like lack of capital, limited distribution, poor execution, team dysfunction, and even your own emotional well-being. The more “baggage” you have in your payload, the more thrust you will need.

As a founder, you need to be honest with yourself and ask if you have the stamina and grit to pursue your startup idea to the end. It is easy to say yes when you are just getting started, but here are some questions you might want to explore:

If you have no experience or network in the market you are pursuing;

1. Why are you excited about your idea and the problem you are solving?

2. How do you plan to learn about and immerse yourself in the market?

3. What unique insights have you uncovered that gives you an edge?

If you do have experience and network in the market you are pursuing;

1. Are you passionate enough about the problem to build a business around it?

2. What unique insights do you have that enable you to go to market faster?

3. Why have others in your industry not built this idea or have been successful?

Paul Graham of Y Combinator mentioned in his last essay something quite relevant and thought-provoking related this topic. Saying a founder must have passion and “love the problem” can seem ambiguous. Paul however gets to the underlining truth that successful startups are built on the foundation of great work:

Are you curious enough to dig deep enough, to climb high enough, and to traverse the vast emptiness of the desert to build something meaningful? If the answer is yes, then you are already far long the way to creating a successful startup.

Mark Birch

I have finished up my time at AWS, so where does that leave this newsletter? It is a big question because I am starting down the path with my own startup. One thing is clear that the amount of time I had in the past to craft long-form content will not be the same.

However, this is a labor of love, and I enjoy sharing the things I learn with you. Writing is also my method for exploring ideas and clarifying my thoughts. As much as this newsletter is a product to be consumed by others, it is also something that I personally rely upon.

I decided to keep publishing Founders in the Cloud for the foreseeable future. I will still adhere to the weekly cadence when feasible. The content will change though as I share topics that are top of mind for me as I build my startup. In a sense, I am building in public.

One of the things I plan to change are the content sectiosn of the newsletter. While I liked the three section format, the Commentary section seemed more like a second essay at times. Going forward, I wil use that space for links to content I find useful without my opinions.

The Community section will also likely evolve. It mostly served as a place to share events and various travels. Given that I am less likely to travel as much as I had with AWS. What ideas do you have that would make this section valuable for you?

There is also a huge network of experts that I am connected to and over 6,400 subscribers to this newsletter. This is an awesome opportunity to let some of you share that experience to a wider audience of startup founders and corporate technology leaders.

Let me know if you want to get involved! I do all the editing and getting the article prepared for distribution. All you need to do is share your experience in a narrative format. And I am happy to help you along the writing process to mold it into something you would be proud of.

Message me at [email protected] and let’s chat more!